Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus 149
Forbes has an update on what sort of future Nokia faces, as Microsoft reveals a strategy for making sense of the acquisition:
[Microsoft EVP of devices Stephen] Elop laid out a framework for cost cuts in a memo to employees on July 17. Devices would focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones. Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland. It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China. Also, CEO Satya Nadella gave hints about how Microsoft will make money on Nokia during Tuesday' conference call. Devices, he said, "go beyond" hardware and are about productivity. "I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity."
In other words, the sale of a smartphone is a means to other sales.
Hit: When your business fail: set a new plan... (Score:3, Insightful)
This will make the failure looking like a thing of the past and make hope for a successful new future.
But this don't grant that this will work as expected. Especially after you use the same plan almost each 6 months for more than 3 years now !
Re:Sigh, that's another waste of time then. (Score:5, Insightful)
It might work for enterprise users (I'm sure that's a /really/ big market!!) but lack of decent apps, or even popularly used apps is the nail in the coffin for me as far as their mobile Windows OS is concerned. The phone hardware was good, the OS completely lacked.
Such a shame.
Why does the OS lack when there's just a lack of apps? Seriously? The OS is fine.
It's just that a THIRD platform (after Android and iOS) has very little hope of getting a foot into the door. MS obviously hopes that it can change that in the long run by fusing Windows and WP as a platform. I think the gap is too large to make this work, but it's really neither the hardware nor the OS that is the actual problem here. Still, MS has more than once proven that it has the patience to turn things around (they all but missed the Internet once and a few years later IE was moving towards a monopoly) and they surely hope they can pull something like this off again.
I'm not very optimistic here, but the OS wars aren't over yet.
Its dead Jim! (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows mobile phone forays are dead, done, finito, kaputt and out of steam.
Windows Phone 7 has been out for almost 4 years and still barely holds 3% market share. Thats pretty awful by any measure, especially since the platform before it had much larger market share. They lost customers with current platform without gaining any new ones.
Windows Mobile was out 7 years and failed, and before that Microsoft failed with Pocket PC.
I am amazed they still happily beat the dead horse instead of putting effort into supporting the winning platforms. Android will be succeeded by something in the long run and until then i fail to see the business perspective of dragging a dead horse round the racetrack with a lawn mower trying to catch up with a Jumbojet. Why not just book a seat in the Jumbojet instead?
Personally im sure Nadella would like nothing better than to put a fork in Windows Phone, but entrenched forces inside Microsoft makes this very hard. It has to fail on its own dying a long agonizing death instead.
Re:OCR (Score:5, Insightful)
> I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work
I'm afraid you could have left it right there, with no mention of cell phones or their cameras. OCR, much like speech-to-text software, has plateaued and not noticeably improved in the last 10 years. It's became more available as software has become more powerful. But the underlying technologies have been quite stable. Despite flurries of new patents with every update to such software, the fundamental algorithms remain unchanged and have been stable for roughly 20 years.
Re:It's a funny world (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got the worse decision-making that I've seen in the last 20 years.
You must not have have been following the Nokia story until now then.
Re:that feature exists already (Score:4, Insightful)
You can use the "Office Lens" with Windows Phone 8 phones today. Handy.
Guess that is useful for those 3 people.
I think the strategy should be obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sigh, that's another waste of time then. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether Symbian is a good platform or not involves more than just if the code is functional. Sometimes a lack of applications is driven by a more fundamental weakness in a platform. One of the reasons the iPhone and iPad have done so well courting application developers is that Apple tries to keep everyone marching in formation, moving the platform forward without leaving current customers too far behind. (Their formation, of course, but they are Apple)
A good example is the "pixel doubing" that went into the early iPad design. That intentionally structured the design of the platform so that applications written for lower resolutions would continue working against the higher pixel counts. That's the sort of subtle thing you do to keep developers happy and application development flourishing.
Faced with the same sort of devices with multiple resolutions problem, Android leaves the whole mess in the lap of application developers. And Nokia has just abandoned the old stuff. If you're a phone developer, how would you feel about that? A lot of things like that influence whether applications are built for a platform or not.
And, yes, Microsoft has bullied their way into a winning position using their operating system monopoly for a long time, with IE being a good example of that. I don't think it's safe to assume that tactic will keep working anymore though. I don't know anyone who feels Windows compatibility is an important thing on their phone or tablet today. At best, I might want something that opens Word or Powerpoint documents someone sends me in an e-mail. You don't need Microsoft for that on your phone though. Their software is only needed if you expect to edit the documents with low risk of corruption, and that still happens on desktops.
Re: Master Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I think the strategy should be obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, they've already announced most the staff are going, all of it's factories sound like they're going to be replaced with Microsoft's own, and it's Finnish engineering premise is being "unwound" aka shutdown too it seems.
What is left other than IP? It seems like Microsoft just took a competitor out of the market and took all their IP - a competitor because they were still doing better than Windows Phone before Microsoft took them over even if they were falling in the face of Android and iPhone.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Elop (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone explain to me how there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against Elop and Microsoft for his blatantly obvious tanking of Nokia intended to reduce the purchase price? How have shareholders not sued? Why aren't Nokia employees, who are about to get laid off en-masse, not contacted lawyers and sued? Seriously, this is something that was insanely obvious as soon as Elop joined Nokia - we were talking about it extensively on Slashdot - and it played out EXACTLY how we all predicted it would.
Where are the lawsuits?
Re:It's a funny world (Score:2, Insightful)
How much does a middle aged Slashdot ID go for nowadays? I might be in the market to sell mine to an astroturfer.
Re:Its dead Jim! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny it is kind of the Mac v PC battle of the late 80's-90's. Platform wins. I have a Lumina 920 and it is a great phone. Win phone is fun to use. But ...: not a lot of apps for it. Not that I care much. I'm not into social media crap or a dozen other things. What it does really well right out of the box: hotmail, gmail, facebook contacts all automatically merged (after logging into the relevent apps of course) and shown in one place. It doesn't matter if someone's hotmail has their phone number but their mailing address is only saved on there FB page: it all shows up in the same contact. Dido: things like birthday's and holidays: automatically figured out and notified.
That is pretty much all I needed from a phone: contacts in one place and access to FB for the 1-2 times a month I actually check it. But: I am not the typical smartphone user. MS missed the cool factor boat by a couple years and now have to bribe people (sometimes literally by supplying in house devs to help support a big name app get ported to the platform) to develop for it. Since people aren't sure if they can find the app they want on WinPhone they just go for an Android or iPhone. Them giving out WinPhone for free now will maybe get them a better market share in the low end phones for the developing world but: if you are giving away the software what is the point being in the business? (If you are hoping on making money on selling apps you don't want the entry level 3rd world population as your customer base either).